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Navigating the Vortex

Navigating the Vortex

By: Lucy P. Marcus & Stefan Wolff
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 We live in a complex and ever-changing world. To navigate the vortex we must adapt to change quickly, think critically, and make sound decisions. Lucy Marcus & Stefan Wolff talk about business, politics, society, culture, and what it all means.

www.navigatingthevortex.comLucy P. Marcus & Stefan Wolff Economics Political Science Politics & Government
Episodes
  • Despite superficial consensus at the Nato summit, the US has abandoned Ukraine

    Despite superficial consensus at the Nato summit, the US has abandoned Ukraine
    Jul 7 2025
    Recent news from Ukraine has generally been bad. Since the end of May, ever larger Russian air strikes have been documented against Ukrainian cities with devastating consequences for civilians, including in the country’s capital, Kyiv. Amid small and costly but steady gains along the almost 1,000 km long frontline, Russia reportedly took full control of the Ukrainian region of Luhansk, part of which it had already occupied before the beginning of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. And according to Dutch and German intelligence reports, some of Russia’s gains on the battlefield are enabled by the widespread use of chemical weapons.It was therefore something of a relief that Nato’s summit in The Hague did not upset the proverbial apple cart. Nato allies issued a short joint declaration on June 25 in which Russia was clearly named as a “long-term threat … to Euro-Atlantic security” and in which they restated “their enduring sovereign commitments to provide support to Ukraine”. While the summit declaration made no mention of future Nato membership for Ukraine, the fact that US president Donald Trump agreed to these two statements was widely seen as a success.Yet, within a week of the summit, Washington paused the delivery of critical weapons to Ukraine, including Patriot air defence missiles and long-range precision-strike rockets. The move was ostensibly in response to depleting US stockpiles. But it contradicted the Pentagon’s own analysis, which suggested that the shipment – authorised by former US president Joe Biden last year under a presidential drawdown authority – posed no risk to US ammunition supplies.This was bad news for Ukraine. The halt in supplies weakens Kyiv’s ability to protect its large population centres and critical infrastructure against intensifying Russian airstrikes. It also puts limits on Ukraine’s ability to target Russian supply lines and logistics hubs behind the frontlines that have been enabling ground advances. Despite protests from Ukraine and an offer from Germany to buy Patriot missiles from the US for Ukraine, Trump has been in no rush to reverse the decision by the Pentagon.Another phone call with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, on July 3, failed to change Trump’s mind, even though he acknowledged his disappointment with the clear lack of willingness by the Kremlin to stop the fighting. What’s more, within hours of the call between the two presidents, Moscow launched the largest drone attack of the war against Kyiv.A day later Trump spoke with Zelensky. And while the call between them was apparently productive, neither side gave any indication that US weapons shipments to Ukraine would resume quickly.Trump previously paused arms shipments and intelligence sharing with Ukraine in March, 2025 after his acrimonious encounter with Zelensky in the Oval Office. But the US president reversed course after whatever concessions he had been after were forthcoming – whether that was an agreement by Ukraine to an unconditional ceasefire or a deal on the country’s minerals.It is not clear with the current disruption whether Trump is after yet more concessions from Ukraine. The timing of this latest disruption is ominous, however, coming after what had appeared to be a constructive Nato summit with a unified stance on Russia’s war of aggression. And it preceded Trump’s call with Putin. This could have been read as a signal that Trump was still keen to accommodate at least some of the Russian president’s demands in exchange for the necessary concessions from the Kremlin to agree, finally, the ceasefire that Trump had once envisaged he could achieve in 24 hours.If this is indeed the case, the fact that Trump continues to misread the Russian position is deeply worrying. The Kremlin has clearly drawn its red lines on what it is after in any peace deal with Ukraine. These demands – virtually unchanged since the beginning of the war – include a lifting of sanctions against Russia and no Nato membership for Ukraine, while also insisting that Kyiv must accept limits on its future military forces and recognise Russia’s annexation of Crimea and four regions on the Ukrainian mainland. These demands will not change as a result of US concessions to Russia but only through pressure on Putin. And Trump has so far been unwilling to apply such pressure in a concrete and meaningful way beyond the occasional hints to the press or on social media.It is equally clear that Russia’s maximalist demands are unacceptable to Ukraine and its European allies. With little doubt that the US can any longer be relied upon to back the European and Ukrainian position, Kyiv and the old continent need to accelerate their own defence efforts.A European coalition of the willing to do just that is slowly taking shape. It straddles the once rigid boundaries of EU and Nato membership and non-membership, involving countries such as Moldova, Norway and ...
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    7 mins
  • Nato's summit in The Hague is a critical test for the transatlantic alliance

    Nato's summit in The Hague is a critical test for the transatlantic alliance
    Jun 24 2025
    When Nato leaders meet for their annual summit in The Hague on Wednesday, June 25, all eyes will be on Donald Trump. Not only is the 47th president of the United States less committed to the alliance than any of his predecessors in Nato’s 76-year history. But he has also joined Israel’s war with Iran, threatened regime change, and then brokered a ceasefire between Tehran and Tel Aviv. Closer to Nato’s borders, he seems long have given up his efforts to end the war in Ukraine.Leaders of Nato’s 32 member states should therefore have a packed agenda. Although there are several meetings and a dinner planned for June 24, the actual summit – which has tended usually to stretch out over several days – has been reduced to a single session and a single agenda item. All of this has been done to accommodate the US president. A single session reduces the risk of Trump walking away from the summit early, as he did at the G7 leaders meeting in Kananaskis, Canada, on June 16.The single item remaining on the agenda is Nato members’ new commitment to increase defence spending to 5% of GDP by 2035. This is meant to placate Trump who demanded such an increase even before his inauguration in January 2025. The US president, like many of his predecessors, has also frequently complained, and not without justification, that European members of the alliance invest too little in their defence and are over-reliant on the US. A draft summit declaration confirming the new spending target has now been approved.Even accounting for Trump’s notorious unpredictability, this should ensure that Nato will survive the Hague summit intact. What is less clear is whether Nato’s members can rise to the unprecedented challenges that the alliance is facing. These challenges look different from each of the 32 capitals, but for 31 of them, the continued survival of the alliance as an effective security provider is an existential question. Put simply, they need the US, while the US doesn’t necessarily need to be part of the alliance.Symptomatic for this dependence is the capability deficit that Canada and European member states have compared to the US, which was thrown into stark relief by Washington’s airstrikes against Iran over the weekend. This is not simply a question of increasing manpower and equipping troops to fight. European states also lack most of the so-called critical enablers required to prevail in a potential war with Russia, including intelligence capabilities, command and control structures, and heavy-lift aircraft to quickly move troops and equipment. All of these have traditionally been provided by US forces, and they will take significant time and resources to build up should the US pull back from Europe.For now, Russia is tied down in Ukraine, which will buy time. And the 5%-commitment, even if not all member states will get there quickly or at all, is likely to go some way to mobilise the necessary resources for beefing up Europe’s defences. But time and resources are not limitless. And it is not yet clear what the American commitment to Europe will be in the future and when and how it will be reduced.Nor is it completely obvious what kind of war Europe should prepare for. Russia’s aggression against Ukraine is both a very traditional war of attrition and a very modern technological showdown. A future confrontation with the Kremlin is initially likely to take the form of a grey-zone conflict, a state of affairs between war and peace in which acts of aggression happen but are difficult to attribute unambiguously and to respond to proportionately.This has arguably already started with Russian attacks on critical infrastructure across Europe. But as the example of Ukraine illustrates, grey-zone conflicts have the potential to escalate to conventional war. In February 2022, Russia saw an opportunity to pull Ukraine back into its sphere of influence by brute force after and launched a full-scale invasion, hoping to capture Kyiv in a matter of a few days. This turned out to be a gross misjudgement on the Kremlin’s part. And three years on from that, and partly as a consequence of it, the possibility of a nuclear confrontation can no longer be ruled out either — if frequent Russian threats to this effect are to be believed.Key members of the alliance are unequivocal in their assessment of Russia as an existential threat to Europe. This is evident from the UK’s strategic defence review and a new strategy paper for the German armed forces. Yet, it is not a view unanimously shared. Trump’s pro-Putin leanings date back to their now infamous meeting in Helsinki when he sided with the Russian president against his own intelligence services. In Europe, long-term Putin supporters Victor Orban and Robert Fico, the prime ministers of EU and Nato members Hungary and Slovakia, have just announced that they will not support additional EU sanctions against Russia.Hungary and Slovakia are hardly defence ...
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    7 mins
  • Amid an escalating air and ground war, talks between Russia and Ukraine yield no progress

    Amid an escalating air and ground war, talks between Russia and Ukraine yield no progress
    Jun 4 2025
    News of the spectacular “spiderweb” mass drone attack on Russian air bases on June 1 will have been uppermost in the minds of delegates who assembled the following day for another round of direct talks between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul.The attack appears to have been a triumph of Ukrainian intelligence and planning that destroyed or damaged billions of pounds’ worth of Russian aircraft stationed at bases across the country, including at locations as far away as Siberia.Ukraine’s drone strikes, much like Russia’s intensifying air campaign, hardly signal either side’s sincere commitment to negotiations. As it turned out, little of any consequence was agreed at the brief meeting between negotiators, beyond a prisoner swap, confirming yet again that neither a ceasefire nor a peace agreement are likely anytime soon.As with the similarly inconclusive meeting between the two sides on May 16, the lack of progress is unsurprising. However, the broader context of developments on the battlefield and beyond offers important clues about the trajectory of the war in the coming months.At their earlier meeting in Istanbul in May, Moscow and Kyiv had agreed to draft and exchange detailed proposals for a settlement. The Ukrainian proposal reiterated the long-standing position of Kyiv and its western allies that concessions on the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the country are unacceptable.In other words, a Russian-imposed neutrality ruling out NATO membership and limiting the size of Ukraine’s armed forces as well as any international recognition of Moscow’s illegal land-grabs since the annexation of Crimea in 2014 are non-starters for Ukraine. While the Ukrainian proposal accepts a ceasefire along the frontline, it considers this only as “the starting point for negotiations” and demands that “territory issues are discussed only after a full and unconditional ceasefire.”In substance, this is very similar to Zelensky’s peace plan of late 2022 which failed to get broader traction outside the capitals of Ukraine’s western allies.The Russian proposals are also mostly old news. Moscow’s terms were only handed to Ukrainian negotiators at their meeting in Istanbul on Monday. Given what the Kremlin is reported to be asking for, this is unlikely to have made any difference to the possibility of meaningful discussions between the sides: the full recognition of Russian territorial claims since 2014, Ukrainian neutrality, and the stringent conditions set out for even a temporary ceasefire are hardly in any way more serious negotiation positions from Ukraine’s perspective than Kyiv’s proposals are likely to be to Moscow. In fact, what the Kremlin put on the table in Istanbul is more akin to surrender terms.Ukraine is in no mood or need to surrender. The wave of drone attacks targeted several airbases deep inside Russia on June 1, including some hosting parts of Russia’s strategic bomber fleet. But this, like previous drone strikes against Moscow in June 2023, is more of a symbolic morale booster than signalling a sustainable Ukrainian capability that could prove critical in evening out some of the advantages that Russia has over Ukraine in terms of material mass and manpower.Closer to the frontlines inside Ukraine, Kyiv’s forces also struck the power grid inside the Russian-occupied parts of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions. This may have an impact on any Russian plans for an offensive to capture more of these two southern Ukrainian regions that Russia has claimed since sham referendums in September 2022 but still does not fully control. But much like the drone strikes deep into Russia, it is, at best, an operation that entrenches, rather than breaks the current stalemate.There is no doubt that Ukraine remains under severe military pressure from Russia along most of the more than 1,000km-long frontline. The country is also still very vulnerable to Russian air attacks. However, while Russia might continue to make incremental gains on the battlefield, a game-changing Russian offensive or a collapse of Ukrainian defences does not appear to be on the cards.Kyiv’s position will potentially also be strengthened by a new bill in the US senate that threatens the imposition of 500% tariffs on any countries that buy Russian resources. This would primarily affect India and China, the largest consumers of Russian oil and gas and could cut Russia off from critical revenues and imports — if New Delhi and Beijing decide that trade with the US is more important to them than cheap imports from Russia.Yet, US president Donald Trump, to date has been indecisive when it comes to putting any real, rather than just rhetorical pressure on his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. It is, therefore, not clear whether the proposed senate bill will have the desired effect any time soon or at all.By contrast, European support for Ukraine has, if anything, increased over the past months. It still falls ...
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    7 mins
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